My father, John Logie Baird, was brought up in the old British liberal tradition of good manners. He did not like verbal abuse and bullying, and I'm sure The Weakest Link would have earned an expletive or two from him. It's an example of what probably would have disturbed him most in today's programmes which seem designed to bring out the worst human instincts in ordinary people.

He was generally optimistic about the future of television; not only as a source of entertainment but also for what it could do to international relations. He genuinely felt that if people in different countries could see more of each other, international differences would be, if not eliminated, then certainly reduced. He even once said: "Television will be tomorrow's diplomat."

Privately, he may have had some idea of how much people would end up depending on TV for news coverage, but he did not say much in public for a good reason. He was always anxious to keep the print media on his side in promoting television. The press in the 1920s and 30s was suspicious of even radio news on the grounds that it might discourage the public from buying newspapers. When television news did arrive after the war, however, and well into the 50s, it was mainly studio-based, and an "outside broadcast" was an expensive affair. Certainly, the advent of the hand-held camera and satellite technology have revolutionised television news in a way that my father never anticipated.

Today, with satellite and digital television (neither of which he foresaw), my father's idea of "diversity and competition" has been taken to new extremes. He would have been delighted by the almost unlimited number of channels available to most households - though whether he would have predicted a corresponding dip in the quality of TV is anybody's guess. Some people think that the decline in the quality of television programmes is part of a sinister conspiracy to dumb people down, rather than a reflection of the financial woes of the industry. Fragmentation of the audience has driven television networks to cut their production costs, at the same time as trying by any possible means to keep their audience share.

The question of television programme quality is a vexed one. My father was almost entirely concerned with technical quality of the pictures he could produce, rather than what was shown. But he did realise that what the public really wanted was sport, and some of his most successful television demonstrations were in this area: the Derby in 1931 and 1932, and the Eric Boon vs Arthur Danahar boxing match in 1939. I don't think he could ever have envisaged quite how much money would end up being involved, or how much television would actually change the nature of sport. At the time, players were either amateurs, or professionals on low incomes. The inflated salaries of footballers today - driven by television - would have completely bowled him over. Commercially sponsored events were big in the US, but it took many years for the UK to follow their example. On the cultural side, he was a keen reader of poetry and prose, as well as Shakespeare, Goethe's Faust and Voltaire. I imagine he would have enjoyed a well- produced version of one of the classics, where the words have a bit of wit and a roll to them.

Many of the British television dramas which are seen in North America, such as Jane Austen adaptations, the Jeeves and Wooster series, Morse and Poirot, have been well received. My father would have seen nothing wrong with any of these, though I cannot imagine his becoming a fan of any of them. He was a big fan of HG Wells and some of today's more imaginative science fiction series and science programmes would have appealed to him. But certainly not the ones that are soap operas in space.

On the questions of explicit sex, gratuitous violence and mind-numbing inanity on modern television, it would seem that little has changed since the late Frank Muir wrote to the Times in 1976, asking, "Has television gone from Baird to worse?" My father was a middle-class Victorian, but he had seen the seamier side of life as a Glasgow dockyard apprentice in his student days, and extreme poverty in London in the early 1920s. I like to think that on seeing some of the modern programmes, he might have let fly with a few choice dockyard oaths. My mother, who lived until 1996, was quite often asked directly what she thought of modern programmes. She would simply smile charmingly and say, "Well, of course television must be a good thing as it provides employment for so many people."

· Malcolm Baird is a retired university professor living near Toronto. With Antony Kamm, he has recently completed Tea with Mr Snodgrass - a Personal Biography of John Logie Baird, to be published next summer by the National Museum of Scotland.